Jolt Awards: Coding Tools

Among .NET UI designers, Telerik is a household brand. With the release of DevCraft Ultimate, the company continues to bring some intriguing innovations. Weighing in as 12 distinct products, DevCraft covers UI support for ASP.NET, Windows Forms, Windows Phone, and Windows 8. The bundled Kendo UI offers an HTML5/Javascript framework, jQuery widgets, support for MVV,M and more. Four Visual Studio tools round out the package: JustCode, JustTrace, JustDecompile, and JustMock. This is a lot of software.

I looked at Telerik for the first time three years ago. I had some minor difficulty then with a couple of the products and the documentation was not as clear as it needed to be. I am pleased that those dips have been filled in this version. Still, I would love some UML diagrams of the product architecture  which is an important need given how much functionality is included. My biggest gripe is that Telerik has adopted a model that product installation can be done only over the Internet under their program control. I really want to download the install files and be able to install and configure them on my time, even offline. But this is a gripe I can live with given the richness that DevCraft Ultimate offers.

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